In Syria, killing the messenger hasn't killed the message

A report on the first anniversary of the Syrian uprising

Weeks of sporadic protests seeking government reform burst into
full-fledged unrest on March 15, 2011, when thousands of demonstrators gathered
in four Syrian cities. Within days, authorities had cut off news media access
to Daraa, a center of the unrest, beginning a sustained effort to shut down international
news coverage of the uprising and the government's increasingly violent
crackdown. As the civilian death toll has reached well into the thousands,
according to U.N. figures, the last four months have taken a particularly dark
turn for the press. Eight
local and international journalists have been killed on duty since November, at
least five in circumstances that raise questions about government culpability. Yet
one year after the Syrian uprising began, killing the messenger has not
silenced the message.

A CPJ review of the journalist fatalities found substantial
evidence that two local journalists, Ferzat
Jarban and Basil
al-Sayed, were directly targeted by government forces. In addition, circumstantial
evidence and witness statements point to the possibility that government forces
may have taken deliberate, hostile action against the press that led to the deaths
of three international journalists, Gilles Jacquier, Marie Colvin and
Rémi
Ochlik.

The Assad government has denied targeting the
press but has not hidden its hostility toward independent journalists, effectively
barring international reporters from entering the country to report freely. Colvin
and Ochlik, who like dozens of other international journalists smuggled
themselves into Syria through Lebanon, "must be spies or have links to
terrorist organizations," Syrian state media asserted after their deaths.
As recently as Saturday, the state-run
SANA news agency said authorities were warning international journalists
that anyone smuggled into the country would be held "legally responsible for
their actions and any repercussions" and that "traveling with terrorists" would
be considered "tantamount to terrorism."

CPJ interviews and news accounts show that foreign and local
journalists hold a widespread belief that the government's actions have raised the
danger of reporting in a conflict area well beyond its normally high level. And
numerous journalists who were with Jacquier when he was killed in January, and
with Colvin and Ochlik when they were killed the next month, have said they
believe the press was targeted by government forces.

"When I look back, it was an attack," Paul Conroy told CBS
News, describing a pattern of shelling that struck the makeshift press center
in Homs, leaving him and French reporter Edith Bouvier injured and Colvin and
Ochlik dead. A photographer for The
Sunday Times of London and a British military veteran, Conroy told CBS, as
he did other news outlets, that earlier shelling in the area had been random.
"This" he said, "did what it was meant to do."

And yet the effect on the press is not quite as it might seem.
Syria, of course, remains very restricted and its coverage extremely limited. The
international audience is largely reliant on two types of journalists: the
local citizens-turned-videographers who have shot thousands of hours of footage,
and the foreign journalists who have smuggled themselves into the country.

But these two groups appear to have sustained their level of
coverage all through the deadly weeks of early 2012. This week, Anita McNaught
of Al-Jazeera
English and Paul Wood of the BBC have
openly reported from within Syria. On Monday,
Al-Jazeera
English released McNaught's special
report on
conditions in Idlib, now a central front in the conflict. CPJ
research shows that at least 20 other international journalists have publicly identified
themselves as having snuck into Syria in the last two months to report on the
unrest. The actual number is certainly higher since many journalists have kept
a low profile.

The local journalists are essentially citizens who have filled a
void in independent domestic coverage, risking their lives to document the crackdown.
Several of these citizen journalists have each uploaded hundreds of videos to
YouTube and other online sites that depict the activities of government forces
and the toll on the civilian population. Their footage has been picked up regularly
by international and regional news organizations. The pan-Arab channels Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera have been using
news reports from some of these local journalists, transmitting their words and
images via Skype.

Javier Espinosa, a Spanish journalist who was with Colvin
and Ochlik in Homs, told CPJ he was struck by the resolve of the local citizen
journalists, "They did not stop working,"
he said, "because some of their team was killed."

Deaths highlight the crackdown
If anything, the deaths of the journalists
broadened public attention to the government's crackdown on the civilian
population--particularly its determination to silence independent coverage.

CPJ spoke to a relative of Basil al-Sayed, a 24-year-old
videographer who died in
December in an improvised hospital from a gunshot wound suffered while filming government
forces at a checkpoint in the besieged Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs. The
relative said a sniper positioned on a nearby rooftop shot al-Sayed in the
head, echoing other reports. Al-Sayed's final footage, posted on YouTube,
captures the sounds of gunshots before the screen goes dark. The small
handheld camera that al-Sayed was using would have made it clear that he was
documenting events and not participating in violence.

"If you are holding a camera, you are a walking target," said the
relative, who weeks later lost another family member, Rami al-Sayed, a cousin
of Basil, who died in government shelling while filming in the same
neighborhood.

The first journalist killed in Syria, in November, was another
local videographer, Ferzat Jarban. A florist by trade, he started documenting
protests and the government's violent crackdown in his home of Al-Qusayr. His
footage showed shocking images of dead women and children.

Jarban's body was found in the middle of Al-Qusayr, his body
mutilated and an eye gouged out, according to initial reports. He was last seen
being placed under arrest while filming an anti-government demonstration. Miles
Amoore, a reporter for The
Sunday Times of London, later visited Jarban's hometown and unearthed new
details about the case. He spoke to Jarban's family members, who said the
videographer had been on the run from Syrian intelligence, sleeping in different
places every couple of nights. Based on his interviews, Amoore reported that secret
police in a van had seized Jarban, tortured him, and delivered his body to a town
square.

The message could not have been clearer.

Evidence of government targeting in the deaths of the international
journalists is circumstantial, although the journalists on the ground perceived
that they were under attack. CPJ spoke with Sid Ahmed Hammouche, a reporter with
the Swiss daily La Liberté who
participated in the government-sponsored trip that ended in Jacquier's death. He
said he believes the government laid a trap for the reporters.

Hammouche and Jacquier were among a group of 15 journalists allowed
into Syria on government-issued visas facilitated by Sister
Agnes-Mariam de la Croix, a Lebanese nun of Palestinian
origin with close relations to the Assad regime. Sister Agnes had helped
arrange a reporting trip to Homs on January 11, although she declined to
accompany the group, saying her absence would help them move freely. Jacquier resisted
the Homs trip, believing it unsafe, but Sister Agnes urged him to go or risk
losing the opportunity to renew his visa beyond the initial four-day period,
Hammouche told CPJ in an account consistent with news reports.

Once they arrived in Homs, the journalists divided into two groups,
one with journalists from CNN, CBS, and BBC who were led by the Ministry of
Information to visit a local hospital. The other contingent included Hammouche,
three French journalists, including Jacquier, his wife, Caroline Poiron,
Jacquier's cameraman, Christophe Kenck; and Swiss and Belgian journalists. That
group was escorted by 20 Syrian soldiers dressed in military fatigues and in
plainclothes. This group was also supposed to visit the hospital but they were
detoured without explanation to a pro-Assad neighborhood, Hammouche said, where
they interviewed residents. As they left the area, the group encountered a
pro-Assad march and heard an explosion.

To his surprise, Hammouche said, the soldiers took no evident action
to protect the journalists or respond to the explosion; instead, most of the
soldiers dispersed without explanation, leaving four escorts who appeared relaxed
and dismissed the noise as a "sound explosion." Hammouche said the soldiers
urged the journalists to go toward the explosions to investigate. Hammouche said
he and a Swiss colleague refused, remaining in one of two government vehicles, but
Jacquier and the others traveled toward the source of the initial explosion.

More explosions followed, Hammouche recounted: "There were four
explosions total in a 10-minute period. And that's it. We didn't hear a sound
after that."

Kenck, Jacquier's cameraman, rushed back. The reporter, he said,
appeared to have died in the explosions. At a local clinic where the body was
taken, Hammoche recounted, Syrian authorities were insistent that the
journalists give statements blaming the attack on "terrorists." They also urged
Caroline Poiron to give her husband's body over to Syrian authorities for what
they termed an autopsy, pressure so strong that she, Hammouche, Kenck felt
compelled to stand guard over the body for several hours before it could be
given to French officials.

French authorities later began a criminal investigation; no autopsy
details have been disclosed. The Syrian government blamed the strike on opposition
forces, labeling it a "terrorist" attack.

A
deadly attack, professional resolve

The worst episode for the press came on February 22, when several
government shells struck a makeshift media center in a three-story building in
the Baba Amr neighborhood. Conroy, a former target acquisition/communications
operative in the British Royal Artillery, said he believed the attack was
deliberate because the pattern of repeated shelling on the center was intended
to cause massive damage and take out its target. He told CBS
news that the February 22 shelling did not fit earlier patterns, which
appeared indiscriminate. This time, he said, the strike appeared to have
military coordination: "The first shots hit wide. A second round narrowed their
target. The third set of shots hit the house--'fire for effect,' it's called--and
they fired for effect and killed two very good people, wounded a few others,
and destroyed the building."

Jean-Pierre Perrin, a journalist for the Paris-based daily Libération who was with Colvin and Conroy in Baba Amr
before leaving days earlier, told CPJ that government forces could have easily
picked out the building since it was the only one in the area with consistent electricity,
which was provided by a generator that worked through the night amid an
otherwise darkened neighborhood. Reports
also suggest Syrian authorities could have picked up the satellite phone
signals the journalists used to communicate with the outside world, a tactic similar
to one used by the Russians in the conflict in Chechnya. Technology experts have
told CPJ that satellite phones can be tracked with relative ease.

For those who survived, like Espinosa of the Spanish daily El Mundo, the effect was profound. "It
makes you feel that you can be also a victim of the conflict," Espinosa told
CPJ. "But I always compare my situation with that of the civilians living
around me. And always we, the foreign journalists, are a type of VIP in those
conflicts so we have a duty to keep reporting. For the local citizen
journalists in Baba Amr, it was also the same. They did not stop working
because some of their team was killed. In fact, one was working even after
being wounded."

Said Hammouche: "We are witnesses. We serve as
witnesses to the brutal oppression. And if we let them scare us away, then they
have won."

EDITOR'S NOTE: This alert has been modified to reflect the correct spelling of Sid Ahmed Hammouche.

CPJ Middle East and North Africa Research Associate Dahlia El Zein, a Lebanese native who grew up in Cairo, received her master’s degree in Arab studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C. She speaks Arabic fluently and has traveled widely in the Middle East.

2 comments

Correction: Rami al-Sayed did not die while filming in the same neighborhood. He died from wounds that he got while attempting to help save a family of four, who, unfortunately all died from the shelling that also killed Rami.

@anonymous. Thanks for your comment and correction. Reports definitely say Rami al-Sayed was killed at the moment he was helping wounded civilians. Our broader point is that al-Sayed was at the scene that day to document events. Although he stopped his filming to help the people around him, he was a working journalist at the scene when he was killed. Bill Sweeney/CPJ Editorial Director

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